Cherie Benner Davis posted a photo of a flower arrangement on Facebook. I saw the image and assumed it was a painting because the composition was so terrific. She said, no it was just a photo of some flowers. I asked her permission to use the image to create a painting because I loved the composition so much. She said yes.

The composition struck me as embodying a very Cezanne-like strategy because it simultaneously celebrated symmetry and asymmetry. For example, in “Still Life with Plaster Cupid” and “Still Life with Vase of Tulips” the focal point is placed in the center of the pictorial space suggesting approximate symmetry. However, the viewer’s eye is quickly drawn to the visual weight and highly saturated colors of support elements in the mid to lower left side of the composition creating insistent asymmetry in a “shoe in the dryer” eye path, where the eye cycles throughout the composition and continually returns to the emphatic visual weight/color saturation in the mid to lower left.

I lost my best friend in the year of the pandemic. In this self-portrait, I am wearing the t-shirt she gave me when we went to a LACMA event years ago. I used four pieces of watercolor paper skewed at angles to suggest being in pieces and out-of-kilter from being hit with an unexpected tragedy. She died from alcoholism at age 58. She drank a lot more in her last year, the COVID year. She died on Feb 16, 2021. It was the first day of spring semester.